Apologize, Apologize!

CHAPTER EIGHT

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, I GRADUATED FROM ANDOVER. IT WAS a hot day, and the air-conditioning broke down just before the ceremony, the hall hazy as a sauna. I stepped up to receive my diploma, my hands slippery with sweat, and glancing down, I saw my mother glowering at me from the front row, she and the Falcon separated only by the presence of Pop, heavy-lidded and bored, the smell of whiskey filling the air around him like incense. Ma’s right fist was clenched inside a black leather glove. Her version of a tennis bracelet, it was intended to express her solidarity with whatever injustice currently engaged her imagination. That day, she was pretty worked up about the plight of coffee plantation workers in Brazil.
Bingo got ejected a few minutes later for causing a disturbance with his coughing—based on their experience with him in the past, the staff was convinced it was a deliberate disruption, but this time they were wrong. The intense heat kicked off an asthma attack, the first one he’d had in years.
Two men, their voices turned down low, discreetly tried to escort him away, but Ma, who never missed the opportunity to make a scene, reacted as if Bingo had fallen into the hands of a military junta and were about to become one of the disappeared.
“Get your hands off him!” she yelled, reaching for Bingo’s arm as the men tried in vain to calm her down, audience members craning for a better look, my friends laughing, my nervous system experiencing a series of rolling blackouts.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave, Mrs. Flanagan,” one of the men said firmly but soothingly, as if he were trying to talk down a mental patient from the ledge of a high-rise.
My mother spun around to face me on the stage. “Are you happy now?” she yelled up at me.
Pop, who had up to this point shown unusual restraint, jumped to his feet, wavered a little, and announced, “We’re leaving.” Taking Ma by the elbow, pushing his way past the two men, cheerful Bingo in the lead, he headed down the center aisle. Ma kept noisily resisting.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” she screamed as she vanished from sight, her voice echoing in the corridors, a slight smile crossing the Falcon’s face, his eyes locked briefly on mine, his arms crossed over his chest.
He relaxed his posture, stretching out his legs, and I heard him chuckle. I couldn’t believe it. I was as astonished as if I’d stumbled across a saltwater crocodile giggling over something a giraffe said at the local watering hole.
I stared at him, and then I laughed, too, a little apprehensively, maybe, but it seemed the impossible had happened. The Falcon and I were sharing a laugh.
A few days passed before I managed to work up the courage to confront Ma with my decision about the fall. I may have given up on winning her affection, but I still feared her wrath.
“I’ve decided to go to Brown,” I said, fan whirring overhead, my hand gripping the collar of Bachelor, our two-hundred-pound St. Bernard. He was sitting next to me as I stood in the middle of the kitchen, his dense fur pressing against my bare legs. Panting and grinning, drooling in the early summer heat, steam rising from his dangling tongue, his tail banging, he was leaning into me, and I was leaning back, grateful for the support.
“Oh. And what do you intend to study?” Ma paused at the open refrigerator door, her back to me, then closed it slowly and turned around to face me, a tray of ice cubes in her hand.
“I don’t know exactly . . . I guess maybe I’ll get a liberal arts degree to start. . . .”
She dropped the tray with a bang. It hit the black-and-white checkerboard tiles, ice shattering, shards spraying across the floor. The little dogs attacked like fire ants, scrambling and bickering, competing for the spoils, crunching loudly on the frozen fragments.
“To what end? Film studies? Theater arts? My God, is this about going into show business? You’re going to be an actor? You want to be in the movies, is that what this is all about?” Her voice had a pinging quality, like the taut quiver of a bow.
“No. No. Ma, jeez, here we go. . . .”
“I’m expected to bankroll an Ivy League education so you can churn out crap? Does it occur to you that the world does not need yet another aspiring creative with no talent? Next you’ll be telling me you want to write comic books. Are you looking for fame? Is that it? Is your life nothing more than one enormous vanity project?”
Her hair was getting curlier by the moment, each serpentine tendril coiling into a series of minitornadoes blowing wildly, the room seeming to swirl and spin. I held tight to Bachelor, watching helplessly as the world around me took on a deep indigo blue color, Ma’s eyes flashing like heat lightning.
“You with your bristling bourgeois ambitions . . . Why not just be an orthodontist and be done with it? Proclaim to the entire world: ‘I am a bore. I think only of braces and bruxism and accounts receivable and slender blondes with bobs! Nothing else matters!’”
“Ma, what are you talking about? You never listen. Would you listen for once? You just go off on these crazy tangents of yours. . . .” I was standing there out in the open, Bachelor licking my knee, his watery spit running down my leg, as I shoved my hands through my hair, ducking flying objects coming from the other side of the room.
“He has to ask, my God, he just doesn’t get it. Charlie, do you hear this? Are you paying attention? Your son has just announced his intention to become a movie star.”
Pop was sitting on a wooden chair, reading yesterday’s New York Times. He was always two or three days behind the rest of the world, his bare legs tucked under a long pine table, Bing’s initials carved into its scuffed surface.
“I thought we discussed this, Collie,” he said, sapphire blue eyes peering over the top of the page. “We decided you were going to become a mechanical engineer and design bridges, don’t you remember?”
“Pop, that’s your idea. I don’t want to be a mechanical engineer.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous. How could anyone given the opportunity not want to be a mechanical engineer? A man can do nothing finer in his lifetime than build a bridge.”
“The real question is, how can anyone submit to all those years of Westernized education yet emerge knowing absolutely nothing about what truly matters? The world hovering on the precipice of revolutionary social change, and you want to wear makeup and chase starlets,” Ma said, getting warmed up, practically eating coal, she was that stoked.
“All well and good, Anais, but your revolutions and the men of mysterious angers that spearhead them are small potatoes compared to the timeless achievement of building a bridge,” Pop said, turning his divided attention back to the op-ed page.
My heart sputtered, every nerve ending sparking and shorting. I felt as if I needed to loosen my tie—I wasn’t wearing one. I put a figurative gun to my forehead and fired several times. I missed. Most times, dealing with Ma, I knew better than to jump into the fray, but not this time. This time, I was just plain angry.
“What makes you such a revolutionary?” I walked toward her. “You’re a joke. You shoot your mouth off about the poor, but you don’t have any idea what it’s like to be poor. You don’t even know what it’s like to be middle class. When’s the last time you were even in a grocery store? Uncle Tom does all the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning. What do you do? You think because you don’t wear lipstick that you’re a social maverick? You claim to despise Granddad because he’s some sort of evil oligarch, but meanwhile you use his money to live like a member of the royal family.
“If you were serious about what you say you believe, then you’d give up everything and we’d live among the kind of people you claim to love so much. But you won’t do that because the truth is that you hate everybody—you just want to annoy everyone around you and establish rules for them that you don’t follow. If we moved into some public housing unit, you’d be parading around in a tiara and bragging about your silver spoon. How can you stand being such a hypocrite?”
Whenever Ma was confronted, which wasn’t often, she’d inevitably react with a preternatural calm, swallowing her furies and reimagining her anger as a state of Zen, heightened tolerance her favored tool of torture. She smiled over at me, a doctor’s wife sheathed in silk and sarcasm, exuding the kind of painful predatory pleasantness usually confined to social encounters among strangers who instinctively dislike one another.
“What is this? Some kind of teenage tantrum? Upset because you can’t get a date to the dance, Collie? Yes, I use your grandfather’s money. You bet your ass I do, because it suits me. I like the fact that I’m committing enormous amounts of his fortune to destroy the system that helped create him and protects and sustains everything he stands for—and believe me, Collie, I make things happen with that money. I serve my causes well.” She leaned back against the fridge, arms folded in front of her, self-satisfied grin on her face.
“Oh, please, you’re always intimating that you’re some kind of international outlaw when all you do is hand over money to a bunch of homegrown Marxist phonies who’ve learned how to work the cocktail circuit. Granddad has a party and you show up in work boots and start insulting everyone, and you think it means something, like you’re on the front lines of battle—when all it really means is that you’re a jerk who enjoys making people uncomfortable and belittling them.”
“Here, here, Collie, your mother deserves better than that. She is your mother, for goodness’ sake,” Pop interjected.
“Don’t remind me,” I said.
Ma laughed. “Spoken like the spoiled adolescent you are. Oh, let him talk, Charlie. I don’t mind. Only a fool argues with a fool. And anyway, it’s good practice for when he’s acting out scenes in his little movies, helps him get used to all that second-rate dialogue he’ll be spewing for the rest of his life. Is this an audition of some kind, for one of those beach blanket movies?” She looked at me with utter contempt. I was fighting with all my heart the urge to let her have it, wishing a giant anvil would drop from the sky and turn her into a scrambled grease spot on the floor.
I glanced around at the sound of the kitchen door opening and banging shut once and then again, a warm, sudden gust of salty sea air lifting up the corners of the curtains and scattering the newspaper. Tom and Bingo returned from a walk with so many overheated frothing dogs, they flowed like lava into the kitchen.
I struggled with the urge to pant.
“Collie says he’s going to be a movie star,” Ma said as if she were announcing I was suffering an outbreak of genital herpes. Bingo rolled his eyes.
“For the last time, I don’t want to be a movie star.”
“It’s the only way he’ll ever get the girl, Ma—if it’s in the script,” Bing said, reaching into the fridge for a bottle of soda.
“I think you’re aware of my feelings on the subject,” Tom said, removing his straw boater and sitting in the chair across from Pop. He stared at me.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Oh yes. I have only two words for you.”
“Not again.”
“Pigeon coach.”
“For God’s sake, Tom, how many times must we go through this? He’s not going to coach pigeons.” Ma threw her arms into the air and then, bending over, pulled Marty, one of the poodles, onto her lap and buried her face in his curly topknot.
“And why not? Racing pigeons are the thoroughbreds of the sky. Owning a flock of racing homers is the same as owning a professional sports team. Even the damn Royals keep a flock of racing pigeons.”
“Would you stop talking about pigeons? Leave it to you to champion a public nuisance,” Ma said.
“Oh, and I suppose GI Joe is a public nuisance, is he? The most highly decorated pigeon in American history, was he being a pest when he saved the lives of one thousand British soldiers?”
“To say nothing of Captain Lederman, Jungle Joe, and Blackie Halligan,” Bingo said from his spot in the doorway as he sipped his Pepsi. “And don’t forget your own Michael Collins, Uncle Tom. Boy, there was a glorious bird.”
“Thanks, a*shole,” I said, eliciting a frown from Pop.
“I’m not likely to forget that bird in a hurry. He disappeared on a five-hundred-mile journey. I looked for him for days, weeks went by, and I’d given up. Broke my heart to think a predator had claimed him. Six weeks later I went out to the loft and there he was, bless his noble heart, his wing broken. He couldn’t fly, so what does he do? He walks.”
“And he wouldn’t have made it but for the Brooklyn Bridge now, would he?” Pop said.
“For God’s sake, Tom, don’t be absurd. Why do you say such preposterous things?” Ma said. “You fill the boys’ heads with utter nonsense.”
The old lady, sighing deeply, decided to put an end to the conversation—it was an argument that diffused into a conversation as opposed to a conversation that escalated into an argument, both standard progressions in our family. “Well, if you’re determined to be a teen idol, you can get the funding from your grandfather.”
“No, I can’t. He wants me to go to Yale and study international law. But it doesn’t matter. . . .”
“Really? He doesn’t want you going to Brown? The nerve of the bastard. Who does he think he is? How dare he tell one of my children what they’re to do.”
“Ma, I don’t need anybody’s money, especially yours. I’ve been offered a full scholarship.”
“What?” She sprang forward in her seat, Marty scrambling to remain in her lap. “What is this, the final days of the Apocalypse? You can’t be serious? You come from one of the wealthiest families in the country and you’re offered free access to Brown? Meanwhile, children of the inner city are left to their own impoverished devices, even at the elementary school level—”
“Ma, for Christ’s sake, a scholarship is based on academic merit, not need.”
“Bullshit! Academic performance is skewed to socioeconomic background. . . .”
“Oh, the Ivy League, is it? Bingo, don’t look at him. No one can have eye contact with him now he’s a Brown man. And don’t talk to him. He’ll only converse in Latin, hadn’t you heard?” Tom said, cast-iron skillet in his hand, preparing to make his habitual late lunch of bacon and eggs—singing to himself every afternoon, “Tom Flanagan’s makin’ himself some eggs and bacon.”
“Didn’t you tell me you wanted to get your doctorate? What was it you said? Something about being attracted to the academic life . . . ,” Bingo said unhelpfully.
“That’s a lie and you know it.” Along with everything else, the old lady despised academia.
“Dr. Fancy-Pants needs to go to Brown to learn to ask people to pee in a cup,” Tom said provocatively—deliberate misunderstanding was his favorite form of interaction—while cracking the first of several eggs against the edge of the skillet.
“Not that kind of a doctor, you jackass,” Ma said, finally about to lose it, squeezing shut her eyes, her lips whitening, anger pumping through her bloodstream in incremental surges—like a balloon receiving helium, she was about to burst.
“Now that you say it out loud, ‘Dr. Flanagan’ does have a nice ring to it,” Pop said, chin in hand, newspaper bent, staring dreamily out the window; then, frowning, he abruptly interrupted his own reverie. “For heaven’s sake, Collie, promise me you’ll not become a pathologist . . . God knows what they get up to.”
“I’m not sure what I want to do . . . I’m just thinking. . . .”
“Remember, back home, the case of Annie Mulroney’s boy?” Tom interjected. “He was a pathologist and got caught photographing dead people’s genitalia. Turns out he had quite a collection, claimed it was an innocent hobby and educational. . . .”
“I was thinking of him,” Pop said. “Wasn’t there some problem with him performing prostate exams postmortem, alleging it was research done in the service of science? But you know, I still say curing athlete’s foot in Africa isn’t worth one-two-three compared to the building of a lovely suspension bridge.”
“If you mention bridges one more time . . . honestly, Charlie, you’d think you lived under a bridge, the way you romanticize them—” Ma was starting to sputter.
“Say,” Tom interrupted, using the same tone people typically reserve for sudden revelations. “Let me go on record as saying I’ll take you out and shoot you myself if you go ahead and become a priest.”
“A priest! Jesus, Lord, Collie, you’re planning on the clergy? Your grandfather would turn over in his grave,” Pop said, a look of horror on his face.
“Who said anything about being a priest? I’ve never even thought about being a priest. I don’t want to be a priest.”
“That’s not what you told me,” Bingo said, lifting himself onto the window seat in the dining room, his legs dangling playfully, his eyes shining.
“Collie, I’m begging you. I’m on my knees to you. Don’t waste your life in a Roman collar.” Pop finally put down The New York Times, signaling his level of commitment to the conversation.
“He’s going to wind up just like Francie Sherlock,” Tom said, expertly scrambling a pan full of eggs.
“Who the hell is Francie Sherlock?” I said.
“Language. Watch your language,” Pop said, frowning. “Anyone can curse, you know.”
Pop liked to compare swear words to termites. “They’ll bring down a man’s character in the same insidious ways as a termite works in secret to destroy a building.”
“Our first cousin, he was your second cousin,” explained Uncle Tom. “When he was little, the nuns warned him against biting into the Communion host, said it was the literal body and blood of Christ. Francie didn’t believe them, and when he was twelve he was showing off for some girls and he bit into the host and wound up with a mouth full of blood. I say he bit his tongue, but it made quite the impression on him, and he joined the Benedictine order. He was killed a week after getting his first parish, hit by a car while he was heading off to give Agnes O’Connell extreme unction.”
“I don’t get it . . . what’s it got to do with me?”
Tom sighed in exasperation. “Do I have to spell everything out for you, Noodle? He was abusing himself in the rectory when one of the ladies from the Catholic Women’s Society rushed in to tell him about Agnes having a heart attack. She screamed at the sight of him, and he was so flustered that he ran wildly out into the street, and that’s how he got killed.”
“Collie, please, masturbation is a sin of vanity, it’s a terrible waste of time, a drain on your manhood, and once the pedal and crank takes hold of a man . . . ,” Pop said.
Bingo shook his head from side to side. “Too late, Pop. Why do you think I screamed when I walked into Collie’s bedroom last night?”
“I’ll go mad if I have to listen to any more. Must you go on and on about this, Collie? Such narcissism—is every discussion in this house to concern only what you want? It’s too much. I can’t handle any more.” Ma clutched her head, her hands a helmet compressing her skull, which was threatening to explode.
Most conversations with Ma concluded on a similarly theatrical tormented note. Implicit in every encounter, however banal, was the threat of her suddenly evaporating, vaporized by the ubiquitous self-centeredness of others. The world, according to Ma, had nothing better to do than think up ways to drain her blood, a little bit every day.
“Fine,” she wailed. “Have your own way. Do whatever you want. I haven’t the strength to fight you on it. I’ll pay for it, if it will just put an end to your interminable whining, but only if you go to Brown. You must go to Brown. You let me handle your grandfather,” Ma said, rising to her feet in a swirl of rising tides and cloudy consternation. Brushing past Bingo, patting him on the head as if he were a puppy, fluffy pick of the litter, she ducked into the hallway, Marty following her up the stairs.
“What’s her problem?” Tom asked as Pop shrugged.
“Girls only,” he said, raising an eyebrow, the unfastidious specter of female problems resolving the discussion.
“Hey, Collie . . .” Bingo stopped me at the door as I headed down to the beach to drown myself.
“What do you call a guy that f*cks models all day long?”
“Bing Flanagan.”
“That’s who I want to be.”